1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to a tool for analyzing a system and its particular parts, given specific data on the system, the particular parts, and their usage, in order to provide a total picture on the sustainability of a system.
2. Background
Parts management may be a difficult task, particularly for a manufacturer or operator maintaining a complex system, such as an aircraft. For example, an operator may track not only hundreds of thousands of different parts for any given aircraft but also may track hundreds or even thousands of aircraft.
To complicate matters, manufacturers regularly may end production of any given system, and the manufacturer also may end production of parts for the given system. In other cases, a part manufacturer may be different than the system manufacturer, in which case the part manufacturer may end production of the part at any time, possibly without warning to the system manufacturer or system operator. Eventually, the manufacturer of a part may cease support for repairs to parts for the given system. An operator may attempt to track these dates as part of the maintenance planning process for a system. Tracking these dates for hundreds of thousands or even millions of parts, or more, may be difficult, especially as the importance of any given part to a system may vary, as may the lifetime of the given part based on the part's usage within the given system.
For example, each individual airplane among thousands of airplanes of a particular type may have a particular kind of part. However, for each of the individual airplanes, the particular kind of part may have different lifetimes that are to be tracked. The problem may become more difficult when tracking all parts for that particularly type of airplane at the desired level of detail. The problem may become more difficult still when tracking different kinds of parts at the desired level of detail among many different kinds of airplanes.